Red Bull Racing driver Sebastian Vettel says that he is still hopeful that he will avoid taking a ten place grid penalty by using another engine this season, as he struggles to stay within the 8 engines a season allocation.
Vettel has said that the team will continue with their current plan of limiting the mileage done by the cars in practice in order to try and make his allocation last until the end of the season. Vettel suffered a number of engine failures this season, including two in one weekend at Valencia, and is now onto his final Renault V8 that he is allowed to use.
Should he have to change the engine again before the end of the season, he would suffer a ten place grid penalty at the next round of the championship. Vettel did almost no Friday practice running at Monza in an attempt to keep the engine fresh.
"To survive with the engines we have is quite simple - they have to be all perfect from now on," Vettel grinned.
"Friday running, as we have seen at the last two races, is very restricted for me and for sure we cannot have another failure. If we do, obviously we have to accept the penalty and take an extra engine. That is not what we want, so the plan at the moment is to run a little on Friday in order to avoid the penalty."
An alternative plan that is available to the team would be to strategically change an engine at a track where they are aware that they will struggle for pace anyway in order to then be able to use the replacement unit to conduct proper running at a stronger track.
But Vetel admits that although that is a strategy that could pay dividends, the best track for them to do it would have been the Monza circuit, where the team suffered one of their least competitive outings of the season. The remaining tracks are, he says, too difficult to predict the pecking order for.
"With hindsight it probably would have been okay to take a new engine and the penalty in Monza when you look at the result, but then you never know," Vettel mourned.
Vettel also defended the Renault team, who supply Red Bull with customer engines, after the company was largely blamed for RBR's failure to stay in the title race by team boss Dietrich Mateschitz. Both Vettel and his team mate Mark Webber have suffered reliability issues linked with their powerplants. But Vettel said that the problems the team had at Monza were more than just engine related.
"I think our performance in Monza was not an engine problem, but I am not telling a secret when I say that the Mercedes engine is a very strong engine," Vettel blabbed, namedropping the company that Red Bull are rumoured to want to switch to for engines in 2010.
"But we have to be fair to our partner Renault. They are trying to do their best and are working very hard, so I don't think that we've lost out in Monza due to engine problems."
Vettel also reiterated that he will still fight for the championship over the remaining races, while he remains in with a mathematical chance of the title, despite the German having slipped to 26 points behind Jenson Button in the standings with just 40 points left to play for.
"I will fight to the last breath and minute," he bellowed while thumping his chest, "From now on our target has to be to win. We will see every race separately, and in the end we will count the points and will see whether it is enough or not. It's true the gap is quite big - 26 points says it all - and it will be very difficult to catch up, but be sure we will try."
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
